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| I tried to find an article about the abortion ban, but all I found was this http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/choice-action-center/in_your_state/who-decides/nationwide-trends/abortion-bans.html
Anyone else?
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| For the past week or so, I've only been drinking water or diet energy drinks (read: coffee with Splenda, sugar-free Red Bull or Rock Star, Vault/Coke Zero) to try and lose weight. It's worked, but I can't get the taste of artificial sweetener out of my mouth. Also, on a lot of things I see a warning about phenylalanine. For those interested, it turns out it's an amino acid with 92 different health risks. Such as death, brain damage, birth defects...Good for losing weight, I guess. Also, a warning: when you use appetite suppresants (caffeine, nicotine, ephedrine...umm...I'm sure there're others) and they wear off, you feel all the pent up hunger at once.
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So tonight I was trying to justify not writing a paper because I wasn't interested in it. It was just a short assignment on Alabama law--read and regurgitate. I was accused of being "lazy and ungrateful", which I think is totally unfair. I had no reason to do the assignment. I wasn't interested, it's worth less than 1% of my grade, and I knew the subject material anyways. I was then admonished that I was disobeying my instructor; he had authority over me, and I should obey him.
This one gave me a little bit of trouble, but I maintained my view. The only reason any professor has authority is because the students give it to him. We believe that the professor can help us learn about whatever it is he's an expert in, so we give him the authority to give us assignments and judge whether we completed them satisfactorily. Thus, if the professor gives an assignment with a purpose to learn something, and I either a) already know it or b) have a better way, it's my prerogative to not do the assignment at my discretion, as long as I'm aware that the instructor can take whatever course of action I agreed to at the beginning of the semester.
All of this is just a side note, though. It got me thinking about the separation of church and state. Part of the reason that politics in general disgusts me is that there are people who use arguments that can't be proven as justification for laws; in specific, people who use God to argue for things such as abortion bans, gambling bans, etc. These people claim that when the founders of this country advocated the separation of church and state, they meant "church" in the sense of denomination or such. They say that the country was founded on Christian principles and that's enough to allow God to be put in the lawbooks.
I think they had something deeper than that in mind. In their time, it WAS one denomination versus another--the Church of England vs. everyone else. However, the important thing was this; the Church's views that conflicted with the Protestants couldn't be proven. When they claimed God said so-and-so, they said, "Within the realm of things that can't be proven, there exists a God that says A, so we should follow A." The Protestants disagreed, saying instead of A there was B. I think our forefathers recognized that this lead nowhere. They advocated separation of ANY church and state so lawmakers could get things done, instead of the Senate becoming a glorified theological debate.
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As another small foray into political philosophy, I think that it would be a great help to integrate philosophy with government. This would entail making a Constitution and a Meta-Constitution; the Constitution would be a formal statement of all laws of the country, for legal use, and the Meta-Constitution would be the philosophical equivalent. It would state the principles (or axioms) that the government was based on, and each law in the Constitution would have a counterpart in the Meta-Constitution that explained WHY it was brought about and which preceding laws (or axioms) JUSTIFIED that law. Cross-indexing these would create a very useful way to ensure that any laws made would be internally consistent, and any debate about laws would be reduced to interpretation of precise philosophical relationships, which is a lot better than the arguing we have today over wordy, unclear, ancient statements.
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Also, a reply to Robert's comment on my last entry: it wasn't just mathematical truth I was talking about. It was ALL truth. We can't just take it that truths exist because it's one of those things; in fact, if there is no truth, there ARE none of "those things". Some relativists claim that reality is simply a useful illusion (including math) that while they approximate the truth with varying degrees of closeness, none of them are actually true at all.
Of course I realize Gödel's Theorem has nothing to do with this directly. It was his theorem, however, that got people to think about "jumping out of the system", which is what creates problems with things like self-reference. It's only when a system tries to jump out of its perspective and look at itself can things like "This sentence is false" come into play. And intuitively, unless you jump out of your perspective you can't really have an objective look at what you are or how things work. This is what I meant by the implications of looking at his theorem compared to truth; it seems that we might never know if truth (or God, or any number of things) exist because we don't have the capability to jump out of ourselves and look down and say, "Ahh, THAT'S how it is. Cool."
I would also slightly admonish my esteemed friend for using things like "sensible". What is "sensible," and why isn't the Epimenides paradox "sensible"? It's hard to say things like this without succumbing to what's wittily called the "Ishmael effect." At the end of Moby Dick, a horrible accident occurs that drowns everyone aboard except the narrator, Ishmael. He offers no explanation for this...How does it happen? In his defense, it would be hard to rigorously define "sensible" at all, much less in a xanga comment. I think in order to maintain philosophical integrity, however, we must avoid using things like this wherever possible.
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| A real entry! Wow!
I am struck deeply and really (although I guess it's kind of ironic to use the term 'really') by the many, many ways in which Godel's Theorem applies to things other than mathematics. To very briefly summarize, Kurt Godel came up with an ingenious way to prove that any sufficiently powerful mathematical system MUST be inconsistent; that is, you can use number theory to make a statement that says, "This statement cannot be proven with number theory." This string can be reproduced in any formal system with enough power to talk about itself. To those that didn't catch the implication, there can NOT be a complete mathematic system! Ever!
The way he was able to do this was through something called an omega inconsistency. Again, to very briefly summarize, this is when a system has a family of theorems that CAN be expressed, but the theorem that describes the family CANNOT. For a crude example, let's take 1 + 1 = 2. 1 + 2 = 3. 1 + 3 = 4. It's fairly obvious that if you add one to any counting-number, you get the counting-number following it. Thus, we should be able to (and can) justify writing "If you add one to X, it will equal the counting-number following X." If we did not have a rigorous, justifiable way to come up with this "summing-up" theorem, we would have an omega inconsistency.
Andrea let me borrow a book, "Truth", which is about the philosophical war between absolutists and relativists. I saw, to my chagrin, that it seems as though absolutists have no way to rigorously prove itself; that the action of trying to prove that there is truth exposes itself to the same problem of self-reference; it would seem that you need truth to prove something is true. Has Godel, using mathematics, unwittingly described how all truth itself can never be proven? At some point, it seems, we (absolutists) have to buckle down and say "I have observed things that are true and false enough times that I can't conceive it any other way, so there MUST be truth." To which relativists laugh. I haven't finished reading the book, so maybe the author is a lot smarter than I am and has championed absolutists more thoroughly.
Thoughts?
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| Soo...I got my WAIS-III results back. 148.
I guess that's it. Still haven't finished GEB.
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